The Other Son (15 page)

“Yes,” Natalya says. “I can do this. Is making my ear hurt.”

“And get him to bring the old ones back, before he sells them.”

“The white ones? He has these?”

“Yes. I traded them in. Get him to bring them back. I think this room’s gonna sound shitty whatever speakers we have, so we might as well just keep the old ones.”

Natalya nods and runs a hand across Tim’s bald patch. “OK,” she says. “I think this is good decision.”

“Thanks.”

“And can you maybe do for me something also?”

“Sure,” Tim says. “Anything.”

“Because I do a stupid thing too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. So you don’t get angry, OK?”

“Of course not.”

“OK, I’m going to tell you now. So you’ve promised not to be angry, OK?”

“I promise.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes!” Tim laughs. “Now what? You haven’t boil-washed the kids again have you?”

“Uhuh,” Natalya confirms. “They’re like babies again. But that’s not it.”

“OK.”

“Look at table.”

“The table?”

Natalya nods towards the coffee table.

“OK,” Tim says, doubtfully. “What about it?”

“Look carefully.”

Tim sits up. He leans forward and drags the coffee table towards them. “Oh. Shit,” he says. “How did
that
happen?”

“I try to clean window.”

Tim nods. “I, um, saw that they were clean,” he lies. “But I don’t see the... Oh, you stood on the table? In what,
stilettos
?”

Natalya shakes her head. “So stupid,” she says. “I put chair on table. To reach up high.”

“You put a
chair
on a brand new table? To clean the windows?”

Natalya nods. She looks as scared as she feels.

“No kidding,” Tim says.

“No kidding,” she repeats.

Tim sinks to his knees just as Natalya had done, and again, just like her, he runs his fingertips across the damaged surface.

Natalya has a lump in her throat. She thinks that she’s probably going to cry. “You’re angry?” she asks.

“No,” Tim says, sounding stern if not actually angry. “Is this from...?”

“Tu Casa,” Natalya confirms. “Yes. Expensive.”

“What are we talking? Five hundred?”

“More.”

“A grand?”

“Yes. It’s bad, huh?”

Tim raises his hands to his mouth and exhales slowly, then regains control of himself and says, “No, it’s fine. I’ll take it back tomorrow. They’ll fix it. They owe me.”

“You think so? Really?”

“Sure,” Tim says. “Don’t worry about it.” Then, noticing the tremor in his wife’s voice, he sits back on the sofa and throws one arm around her shoulders, pulling her in. “Hey!” he says. “Babe. It’s
fine
. Really.”

“I’m so stupid,” Natalya whispers.

“As we say in Russia,” Tim says, imitating her accent, “mistake is mistake. Stupid is stupid.”

“And you’re sure? That they can fix this?”

“Of course,” he says. “When you buy stuff at that kind of price, the customer service
has
to be amazing.” In truth, Tim thinks that he’ll probably have to pay for a new table. But yes, he’s sure at least, that they’ll fix it.

“Oh, Timsky!”

“It’s done,” Tim says. “Forget it.”

“And you must forget this speakers,” Natalya says.

“Exactly. It’s a deal.”

“They were fifteen, right?” Natalya asks. “Fifteen thousand?” Once she has said it, she doubts that this is possible. “No, I get this wrong. It’s less, yes?”

“Erm, yeah,” Tim says, embarrassed now about the ridiculous extravagance of the purchase. “Something like that.” He’ll have to phone Edwin in the morning and get him to keep the price secret. He can refund the cost to Tim’s Amex card and if Natalya asks, he can tell her that...

“You know what?” Tim suddenly says. “They weren’t fifteen. They were
fifty
.”

“Fifty thousand?”

“Yep.”

“Wow,” Natalya says, wide-eyed and restraining a smile. “Is big mistake, huh?”

“Yes,” Tim concedes. “My mistake was even bigger than yours. My mistake was waaay bigger than yours. So you get to feel just fine.”

“No, we’re same,” Natalya says.

***

Natalya is in the kitchen cubing potatoes and a slab of beef whilst simultaneously frying diced dill pickles. It’s Sunday morning, and Tim’s parents are due sometime within the next two hours. Natalya hopes that they’ll come later rather than sooner. She’s running behind schedule and what’s more, the later they come, the shorter their visit will be.

She has been putting this off for weeks. It was easy enough at the beginning to claim that the boxes needed to be unpacked first, that they needed a sofa for guests to sit on before inviting the guests themselves, or that as the new stove didn’t work, she couldn’t cook... But as the weeks have gone by, her excuses have been getting flimsier, and finally, yesterday, Tim declared that his parents wouldn’t “give a shit” about the pool having been emptied. They were coming and that was that. And Natalya, who knows Tim’s various tones of voice only too well, capitulated. “It will be nice to have them over,” she lied.

It’s not that she particularly dislikes Alice and Ken – she really doesn’t. It’s simply that it’s impossible for Tim to spend a day with his parents without ending up furious about something they have said. And having no family of her own, Natalya can’t quite see the point in subjecting one’s self to that. Not repeatedly, at any rate.

“Why don’t you get Vlad to do that?” Tim asks. “Get yourself ready.”

Natalya looks up and sees him hanging on the door-frame. His hair is wet from the shower. “I
am
ready,” she says, then, “And I like it. And her Rassolnik is not so good as mine, you know?”

“That’s certainly true,” Tim says, even though, other than the fact that Vladlena’s is slightly more peppery (which he rather likes), he’s unable to spot the difference.

“Where are the boys?” Natalya asks. They’ve been quiet for a while now and that always makes her suspicious.

“In the garden with Vlad and some kid from next door. The three of them are running her ragged.”

“It’s good,” Natalya says. “They will be more quiet when Alice is here.”

Alice actually suggested that Boris might have “that ADHD thing” during her last visit, something Natalya has struggled to forgive her for. They’re just rowdy boys, after all.

The doorbell rings and Natalya stops stirring the frying pickles in order to look all the more outraged. “Surely not so early!” she says. “It’s only ten.”

“Nah,” Tim says. “It won’t be them yet. I’ll go. You cook.”

Natalya returns to her cookery, but as Alice’s voice rings out across the house, she sighs in dismay. “Vot tak,” she mutters. –
Here we go.

“... so big!” Alice is saying as she approaches. “We couldn’t believe it, could we, Ken?”

“I checked the street name twice before I even dared press the doorbell,” he says.

“But our name’s
on
the doorbell,” Tim points out.

“Yeah,” Ken says vaguely. “We, um, we didn’t really see it at first.”

“Yep, dump the coats there,” Tim says, “And come through. Natalya’s cooking right now so I’ll show you around first – Mum? Mum!”

“I’m only going to say ‘hello’,” Alice calls back, and Natalya, who can hear Alice’s heels clip-clopping across the floor, braces herself. “Gosh, this room’s going to be difficult to heat in winter, isn’t it?” Alice adds, as she approaches the kitchen door.

Natalya tips the diced potatoes from the chopping board and wipes her hands on her apron then turns to greet Alice. She crosses the kitchen to head her off before she starts meddling but Alice manages to manoeuvre herself to the stove-side of the embrace even as she kisses Natalya hello. “Gosh, you need roller skates to get around in this place,” she says, already heading for the frying pan. “Russian soup again, is it?”

“Yes,” Natalya says, frowning and following her back to the stove. “You said you like it before?”

“Um,” Alice says, picking up the wooden spoon and stirring the potatoes. “These are sticking. You might want to turn them down a bit. And maybe not so much pepper as last time, huh?”

Eventually, to Natalya’s relief, Tim manages to lure both Alice and Ken from the kitchen on a tour of the house and gardens.

Alice’s comments are all expressions of surprise about the scale of the place, about the sizes of the rooms, about the length of the garden. And yet, somehow, she manages to express all of this without ever offering a compliment.

The house is so big it’s going to be difficult to heat (twice). The floors are going to take a whole day to mop (three times). Who, she wants to know, is going to do the gardening? Because let’s face it, neither Tim nor Natalya have exactly got green fingers. Nothing, not one single thing, is
lovely
, for example. Nothing is perfect, or beautiful. And though Tim had prepared himself to expect nothing more from her, by the fifth comment, he’s already annoyed.

Ken, for his part, offers platitudes. “Nice,” he says, repeatedly. “Very nice.” Occasionally something’s even, “Very
very
nice.” But Tim’s not sure his father actually sees anything these days. He seems lost inside his own head. Tim thinks he could probably show Ken around a council house and garner much the same reaction.

Once the soup is simmering and the shop-bought Beef Stroganoff is discreetly defrosting (no one need ever know), Natalya washes her hands, removes her apron, and, taking a deep breath, joins the others in the lounge.

Now Vladlena has gone, the boys are playing with two plastic Slinkys that Ken has brought, chucking them with increasing vigour down the stairs and then running back to the top to do it all again.

“I love these thing,” Natalya tells Ken. “Proper old-fashion toy.”

Ken smiles. “Certainly beats all that computer rubbish they have these days.”

“Yes. You’re right.”

“I’m not sure the boys would agree with you on that one,” Tim, who has his arms crossed, says.

Natalya walks towards Alice. She is perched on the edge of the leather sofa and is succeeding in making it look like the most uncomfortable piece of furniture that anyone ever owned. She looks, Natalya thinks, like she’s in an airport, waiting for a plane. She looks like she’s about to be interrogated, perhaps, by Judge Judy.

Natalya wonders if the sofa was a mistake. It’s a difficult one, because the room requires something outsized, something huge, something flashy. The problem is that Alice’s diminutive frame and her meek posture require something completely different. What Alice needs is a little floral armchair like the one she has at home.

What it boils down to, Natalya realises, is that Tim’s parents just don’t fit the room. She wonders if any of them do and feels suddenly like an impostor herself.

She sits down next to Alice, then, realising that she has perched on the edge in exactly the same way, she forces herself to slide back in her seat, to throw one arm casually across the back of the sofa as if she owns the place. But despite her efforts, she’s unable to make herself feel any more at home than Alice looks.

The sensation reminds her of when she was younger, when she had first arrived in London, before she had escaped from that horrible hostess club. They had made them wear ridiculously high heels, and she used be fine until she became aware of the men looking at her, until she tried to concentrate on the mechanics of putting one foot in front of another. Once that happened, she was lost. Once that happened, she felt like her body was an alien machine she had to somehow pilot across the room. She had tripped more than once. She had even tipped a whisky and soda over a client.

In Russian you can say that someone feels comfortable in their skin, and she felt the exact opposite of that back then, and she feels almost as uncomfortable right now. She feels, no more, no less, than a fake. Like the fake she really is.

She looks at Tim for reassurance, but his arms are crossed, his features closed. It’s his “talking to Dad” posture. She looks at Ken, his legs splayed in a manly but ultimately unconvincing attempt at taking possession of the room.

None of them should be here, really – that’s the thing. Being self-assured in a space like this requires something that they simply don’t have. It requires, perhaps, what they call breeding. It requires something from a previous generation, something passed on in DNA.

The boys, now bored with the Slinkys, come rioting into the room, and it’s a relief, visibly, to everyone. They begin to tear around the new sofa. Alex is chasing Boris, shouting, “Ooooh! I’m a monster! Ooooooh!”

Alice relaxes a little, even as she tries to catch the boys as they fly repeatedly past her. “You’ll hurt yourselves,” she tells them. “These concrete floors are going to hurt your knees if you fall over.”

But the boys run on regardless, and as she watches them, Natalya realises that they, at least, are comfortable here. Perhaps the next generation won’t feel like frauds after all. Perhaps Natalya and Tim will have managed at least that.

Alice turns to Natalya. “They’ll hurt themselves,” she says again. “It’ll all end in tears.”

“Boys! Slow down!” Tim shouts, and they do, almost imperceptibly, slow down.

“So how have you been?” Alice asks, having to lean and stretch to pat Natalya on the knee. “Have you got over the move yet? Have you got used to the place?”

“Yes,” Natalya replies, glancing at Tim again. “We’re fine, aren’t we?” She wonders if Alice can tell, wonders if her own inability to be comfortable in her skin, to be comfortable in her room, is as visible as Alice’s incapacity to be at ease around Natalya.

When Natalya met Tim, she made up a whole story about her grandparents having come from the Russian aristocracy. She had told him that their wealth had been confiscated by Stalin. Actually, she hadn’t really made up that story, she had stolen it, wholesale, from an article she had read in a magazine. It was someone else’s story. It was a Russian violinist’s story, in fact.

She had known that it was a mistake almost as soon as she had said it but there was no going back, so she had written all the details, in Russian, in a notebook. She checked them regularly. And she has never once slipped up.